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nausea,
anguish, had all become commonplace to me. And as I spent more time
awake and lucid, and was less able to escape my thoughts, despair
began in earnest to join them.
    What was my life now?
    I would never so much as have a private
conversation again.
    I would never be able to use a toilet in
privacy again.
    I would never be alone again. Ever.
    Everywhere I went, there would
be someone else. My independence was utterly gone. My right to live
as I chose, my right to do as I pleased, my freedom … gone.
    In a kind of sick, dreamlike way, I pondered
the ramifications of this surgery. I felt crazed and ill as these
thoughts drifted through my head, but considering them from a
distance, acknowledging them but pretending that they were not
really mine, not really real, enabled me to refrain from bursting
into maddened tears or screaming in hysteria.
    My every bodily function would be noticed by
someone else. Every cough, every sneeze, every hiccup and bowel
movement and moment of indiscretion – all would be known.
    If the thurga became ill, I would probably
become ill too.
    I imagined returning to work with a thurga
walking alongside me, hooked up to me by a hose. How would my
colleagues react? Had they been told of what had happened to
me?
    How could I ensure that the hose joining us
would not snag on the various machines in the laboratories …?
    Would my employer want me back if I had
another – an unpaid, unneeded hanger-on – beside me at all
times?
    My heart sank, if it were possible, even
further. No. I would not be able to return to work.
    I would probably become unemployable.
    This thurga and I – who would want us
now?
    I could never marry. That was not such a
hardship, I supposed; in all honesty, I have never considered
myself the marrying type; but the fact that the option had been
taken from me forcibly without so much as consulting me
rankled.
    I could never flirt again.
    I could never meet anyone ever again
without them seeing my – my deformity. My dependence on
another living creature for survival. My disability . I was disabled now. Just as a
person’s crutches or wheelchair is noticed before any other feature
– just as a person with a disability is marked and recognised
by that feature before all others – so would I be.
    And the staring. I would be
stared at. Like a deformity or a prominent facial birthmark,
my attachment would be stared at more than I was. In fact, I the person
would disappear. Daniel Avari would disappear: I would be known as
‘that guy with the thurga attached to him by a gruesome sort of
tube with bodily fluids in it’.
    Daniel Avari no longer existed. In the eyes
of others, I would become an un-person: just a man with a very
strange disability. People would cease to know me as Daniel. They
would cease to know me as a person.
    I was no one.
    In keeping my life, I had lost my
identity.
    I would never be alone again … yet I might
well become the loneliest person in the world.
    I am an orphan. I have never had any family.
As a child, this saddened me. Yet I discovered, as a young adult,
once I had left the orphanage, that having no family can be an
advantage: total freedom was mine. Total independence. I could go
where I wanted, do as I pleased, and no one, ever, could tell me
not to. I had a job; but if I chose to leave it, the only person
who would starve was me. If I chose to relocate to another city,
another continent, another planet, there was no one but myself to
consider. There was no one to come home to; but there was no one to
tell me not to leave. I was a free agent. My life was all my own;
my days were mine to spend as I would.
    Not anymore.
    Never again.
    I closed my eyes and tried to rest in the
dark … but even in the dark there was no relief. I could feel the
bandages on my ribs and abdomen, and though I could not feel in my
side the hose where it entered me, I was painfully aware that part
of me stretched out of my body and away to my right and led